FORMER SKATE GREAT ROLLS ON DESIGNING SPORT PARKS

They don’t speak the same language, the bureaucrats and the kids. Not when it comes to skateboarding.

Sometimes Kanten Russell is their translator.

He grew up skating in Point Loma and Ocean Beach and was good enough to turn pro. During his 13-year career, he was best known for “going big” — flying through the air down staircases and across gaps in buildings, taking jumps nobody else would.

Now, at age 39, he’s made another leap, into designing skateparks for a living. He’s part of the sport’s ongoing transformation from outlaw status to mainstream, more popular worldwide than ever.

An estimated 6.6 million people ride skateboards in the U.S., according to one 2012 study, and cities all over the country are building parks to accommodate them. San Diego County has more than 30, with several others nearing completion or in the planning stages.

Like the sport itself, the parks are growing up, bigger and more elaborate and no longer tucked in out-of-the-way places. They’re often referred to as plazas because of their open feel and artistic touches. They include many of the same features — stairs, railings, planters, even empty swimming pools — that get kids into trouble for riding on elsewhere.

Some of the new parks are so well regarded by skaters that they’ve become vacation destinations, and city planners say that’s due to an emerging group of designers like Russell who used to ride themselves.

“To use an old-school term, Kanten has street cred,” said Clark Allen, director of parks and recreation in Poplar Bluff, Mo., where Russell helped create a $450,000 skatepark last year on a vacant downtown lot.

“When you start talking about spending that kind of money in a small community, it’s a significant investment for us,” Allen said. “He had a real good understanding of what the kids wanted to see.”

The test for any park is whether people use it, Allen said. “Even when it gets down to 30 degrees here, and if it’s not too wet out, there are two groups of people you consistently see using our facilities. One is the walkers out on trails. The other is the kids with their skateboards.”

The Death Box

Russell got his first skateboard when he was 14. He and his friends rode the streets because there were no parks. Jumping stairs or grinding on rails meant going to schools or downtown office buildings and hoping nobody would call the police.

He got good enough to attract skateboard companies, which sponsored him on promotional tours all over the world and in competitions like the X Games. He had his own line of boards and shoes. His first magazine cover, for Transworld Skateboarding, was a shot of him flying over stairs at Silver Gate Elementary School in Point Loma.

“He was known for big ollies, big gaps, big stairs,” said Blair Alley, the online editor at Transworld. “He was going big, a lot bigger than anyone else.”

When his pro skating career was winding down, Russell got interested in civil engineering and mapping, went back to school, did an internship with the city of Chula Vista, and wound up working with Mike McIntyre, a pioneer in skateparks, at Action Sport Design, now a part of Stantec. It’s one of about a dozen skatepark designers in the country.

Russell has been designing for seven years. He’s married, has three daughters (they don’t skate much) and lives in Eastlake.

Last week, Russell walked the construction site at one of his projects, a 25,000-square-foot facility being built as part of Alga Norte Community Park in Carlsbad. It’s scheduled to open in September, he said.

Carlsbad is where the first modern skatepark went up in 1976 — it no longer exists — and Russell sees the new one as paying homage to that history while making its own mark as a “crown jewel.”

“I’ve done public meetings all across the country to talk about various projects, and every time I show anybody a picture of this park they say, ‘Where is this again and when will it open?’ They will definitely be flying in for this.”

It will include what looks like a swimming pool, which is unusual for San Diego skateparks. Other parks have flow bowls — this one will, too — but the pool is different, a nod to some of the sport’s early rebels who used to sneak into backyards and drain pools so they could skate. It features steps, tile and raised rim, or coping — even a gap where the skimmer would be in a real pool.

“We call that the Death Box,” Russell said. “For the skaters, the goal will be to grind over the coping and over the box. ‘Yeah, I did a grind over the Death Box!’ It’s a challenge, and skaters like a challenge.”

All the concrete has been poured for the pool, except for a section on the bottom that’s missing, exposing the dirt below. That’s intentional, and another sign of Russell’s understanding of the skating world.

“They wanted to pour the whole thing at once, and I was like, ‘How are you going to keep the kids out?’ I don’t care if you have security, I don’t care how high the fence is, they are going to jump over it and they are going to ride this thing. If you think they are going to wait like kids at a candy store and look through the window for the next three months, no way. You have to pour the flat work last.”

They would still want to ride it even with all the dirt and concrete chunks and other wheel-stopping junk that comes with a construction project?

“They’d come here with brooms,” Russell said.

Dressing the part

Part of the process in designing a skatepark is public meetings. Protests from neighbors, common in the early days, have dwindled along with the stereotype of skateboarders as drug-fueled vandals.

Now it’s the skaters who want to be heard, worried that whatever gets built might be lame.

When Russell meets with them, he dresses like a skater — T-shirt, skate shoes, hat — and not like a landscape architect.

“We want to be professional enough to be a good representative for the client, the city, but we also need to be able to relate to the kids,” Russell said. “If they see somebody who is coming in with a suit and tie, they are going to be, ‘Who is this guy? This guy has never ridden a skateboard in his life.’ ”

Alley, the Transworld editor, said it makes a difference to riders who’s doing the designing. “If your city is getting a skatepark, and you see a pro skater’s name on it, you’re stoked,” he said. “You know it’s not just being thrown together by the ABC Playground Company.”

With every construction project, from houses to skyscrapers, there’s always a final step, the walk-through, to make sure everything was done right. Skateparks are no exception.

Kanten Russell goes to his car, grabs a board, and does a skate-through.